Our 2020 Predictions For OpenAI Came True… Here’s What’s Next (#508)

All right, this morning Sam texts me a great idea. He goes, let's go back through the archive. Let's find things that we predicted or strong opinions that we had at the time and let's bring them back up. Let's see, did we get them right? Did we get them wrong? What did we get right? What did we get wrong? And what could we learn from it? And so we're going to go back. Nobody does this, by the way. Everyone loves to make predictions and have opinions and nobody ever goes back unless they were right. Well, we're going to show you where we were wrong on a bunch of these. We did 7 or 8 of these that, um, we had a strong opinion a couple years ago and now they've played out. and we can review how we did. And at the end, we make 2 new predictions. So 2 new things that, things that have our spidey sense tingling, things that feel like they could be big opportunities that we're gonna plant our flag and say, look, I think this is the, this is one of the new ones. And we'll see in 2 years if we're right or wrong. That's at the end of the episode. All right, enjoy.

All right, we're live. What are you drinking?

Oh, this is my secret sauce right now. I'm not telling people about this yet.

Water?

Nope. You can see from the color, it's a little different.

Green water.

I'm just doing some experiments, you know. I thought, you know, we had this— we had Derek from More Plates More Dates on, and he was talking about pre-workout, right? He created Gorilla Mind, that supplement. And then we talked about Bucked Up, and they are a pre-workout supplement. And basically it's like people take a scoop of something before they'd go do their workout so that they get a way better pump and just really like sort of dilates their, you know, vasodilation and it gets them to have a better workout. I want that for work. I want pre-workout for work. And so I am, uh, experimenting with some things that will, how do I have like a boost of boost of focus, boost of productivity?

Yeah. Caffeine. I think it's called, but that's okay.

No, not caffeine. Caffeine is for mere mortals.

Let me, um, let me ask you a quick question. All right. By the way, today's episode's gonna be exciting. So we're gonna actually gonna go over some of the predictions that we've made both right and wrong since the pod started. A lot of these predictions are to come from the 2020 era. We're gonna look back when we're gonna call it, what did you say? The I told you episode.

I told you so.

I told you so. But it is also gonna be, I told you we, are stupid and we get things wrong as well.

I told you so. And sorry I told you that because I might have been wrong, right? But I got it.

But I definitely told you. I definitely told you.

I just want you to take your right hand. I want you to put your right hand in the air real quick. And I want you to reach back and let's give ourselves a little pat on the back here.

Why?

Not because our predictions were so great, but because we're actually revisiting predictions because predictions are one of these things that people love to do. They love to— people love to spout random opinions about stuff. And then they just go— they just— it just all gets washed away in the noise of social media. Rarely do people ever go back, and when they do go back, it's only for one reason: when they were right. Nobody ever goes back and says, you know what, nobody asked, but hey, I just want to tell you, I think I was wrong about that one, or I was at least half wrong about that one. And, uh, that's not the code we live by. Not here, not us. And so we're going back. Nobody asked us to do this. We're going back and we're revisiting some of the shit we said and we're trying to figure out, were we right? Were we wrong? Or something in between. And, uh, we have a handful of these that we're going to go back and these are, like you said, 2, 3 years ago. So they've had time to bake and, uh, we'll see how they come out.

Not much time, but a little bit of time. And the thing about predictions is I was, uh, you know, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in the world right now. And I was curious. I was like, you know, you and I have been having this discussion a little bit off the pod about like. Where do you invest your money if you think the world's going to end? Like part thought exercise, part like things are crazy. And I was looking at like a lot of really smart people, smart money people. Bill Ackman, Ray Dalio. You cited Ray Dalio. You, well, Ray said this, and my reply to you was, yeah, but he's been wrong about X, Y, and Z. And I had to go and dive deep about where they were wrong. Because if you just read the Wikipedia page, you see when they are right. Like Bill Ackman was right about all these things. I was like, oh, but he actually lost a ton of money on this thing. Predictions are challenging, uh, because not only are they hard to make, but the people who get right, get them right a bunch of times are also wrong a ton of times. So it's really challenging to know who to listen to.

It's like a batting average, right? Like you can bat, if you bat.300, you know, like, uh, I don't follow baseball anymore, but I think you're like an all-star and that means, you know, you're missing 2 out of 3, right? You are, you're, you're not hitting on 2 out of 3 predictions are way, way, way worse than that, right? Like if you're predicting, correctly on 5 to 10% of your predictions, but you're right in a big way, meaning you're non-consensus. So you're bet— you're right about something that a lot of other people are wrong about, then you make it big, which is one of my, one of my favorite quotes. Uh, I said this on the Chris Williams' pod, pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. And so one thing you will see when we go through these, I think, is that the times where we said, ah, it's not going to work. Those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate, right? Because pessimists naturally get to be right more often. However, the money is made when you're an optimist about something that other people are pessimistic about.

Or as my father once told me, hey, even a blind squirrel will find a nut once in a while. So I love that phrase, by the way. Speaking of nuts and seeds, let me tell you about this first one. So a few years ago, I was interested in freezing sperm. The reason I was interested in freezing sperm is because we don't need to know, but okay. No, listen, men's, men's sperm count is going down like a crazy amount. Remember Ben, our old producer Ben had this big thread on Twitter where he was like, he documented sperm count and he like made some drastic prediction that like in 50 years, like very small percentage of men are actually gonna be able to, uh, procreate. And this is actually a really big deal. And so I've been, I've been research, I've been interested in that topic for a minute. And so I tried freezing my sperm and actually re— re-looked at the episode that we talked about it, and the episode was Sam's unboxing of his, of his sperm kit or something like that.

Yeah, because you had it, you like held it up.

Dude, here's the story. I, so like you have to like, you know, you have to like get the sample. First of all, to do it at a hospital, which I also did, you have to bring the specimen 30 minutes after capturing it. So like, if you're not close to a hospital, I don't know what you do. You go in the room, you go in the parking lot. I don't know. It's like a really weird thing to collect. And it's a very shameful thing to hand nurse.

There's a special parking area. There's a covered parking area you can pull into.

It's a very shameful thing. Like when you walk into the doctor and drop the bag, it's way— have you ever given pee? It's like, that's kind of shameful. Giving sperm is, is way worse.

And so I'm always making excuses. I'm like, I just didn't have a lot of water today. Uh, and they're like, we don't need to know. I'm like, I captured the specimen though.

Yeah.

It's a very shameful thing to do.

Do. Um, and I, uh, so anyway, I tried one of these at-home services and I brought it to my office because you have to, you have to do it and then you have the refrigerator and then you have to mail it in. And I like packed it in a box within a box so no one even knew. But I didn't have— I had to do it at lunchtime and people in my office were like, what's in that? What's that in the refrigerator? What's this box? And I was like, oh, it's just a, it's just a thing. It's a thing, but it says like, it says it's like a biohazard or something on there. And then eventually someone like was like, all right, what is this? And I'm like, It's my sperm. And they got— my employees got really angry at me and they like told HR and I was like, I don't know what you want me to do, man. I just— this is what I had to do. So, so that's like a funny update. But I was using— I tried two services. One was called Legacy, one was called Dadi. D-A-D-I. At the time, Legacy had raised $1.5 million. And the update on them is they've since raised a round of $3.5, around $15 million, around $25 million. So what's that? That's a $45 million they've raised. So I presume things are going well with them. So the most recent round was in 2022. Dadi, the company that I talked about at that point, it's, it's kind of a weird name. I don't even like saying that. Uh, they had only raised that out.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's weird, man. So that company has since been acquired. They were bought in 2022 for $100 million. So that is a thing that we, we nailed, I think.

And I think you almost had back-to-back episodes because you also were talking about TRT. We said D2C TRT. I think we were like 6 letters if you want to make $100 million, D2C TRT. And we were both like, that's a great idea. And I thought you were going to start that company because I was like, this is genuinely a fantastic idea. You researched it. And I was like, you're kind of shameless enough to go do that. But you didn't do it, but you did introduce me to the company that was doing it. And we both invested and we both invested in— it's doing fantastic at a company called Hone. And, um, they've gone— I mean, they're gangbusters. Every one of their updates is fantastic. So yeah, I think, I think that was a, that was a right prediction, I would say. And those were both off the beaten path. I don't think a whole lot of entrepreneurs were thinking about capturing the specimen, so to speak. And, uh, you were, and that it paid off.

I think I invested at a $10 or $15 million valuation. I don't actually, I haven't read their updates cuz it, I think got sent to my old email. If you're listening to this, Hone, update my email. But, uh, I imagine that business is worth 9 figures. I would think, I think it's worth 10 times what we invested in. Um, so anyway, that, that's a, that, that's an interesting one. TRT and, um, uh, sperm collection. Yeah.

Those are, those are correct. I can't find this client info. Have you heard of HubSpot?

HubSpot is a CRM platform, so it shares its data across every application. Every team can stay aligned.

No out-of-sync spreadsheets or dueling databases.

HubSpot. Grow better.

Let's do one that was maybe incorrect.

So we were bullish on— I don't know if we were bullish, but we were very fascinated on Bitclout. Another thing that we are fascinated is I remember the day you told me about what an NFT was. When you explained it to me, I thought it was awesome. You're like, I just bought this Kobe thing, this Kobe card. And I was like, all right, that's kind of cool. And then things, the world went a little crazy.

The art for that one was actually amazing, which is like, it was, it was genuinely beautiful to look at. Whereas like NFTs then became like, I got this rock, I have this squiggle. And it was like, uh, okay. You know, like you're trying to make a buck only. There is no like art aspect to this.

And I think you paid $500.

I think we paid $700 or something like that. And then we flipped it for $10,000, like, I don't know, 30 days later. It was actually credit to Ben. So Ben was the one who got us talking to a bunch of NFT guys early on. And, um, you know, the right move would have been to just go like, go crazy on it for a while or invest in the companies behind it. But I saw that this artist I really liked, Boss Logic, was doing one. And the Kobe one looked great. I bought it. And then when I saw it selling for $10,000, I was like, I mean, it doesn't look that great. Like how I'll sell it to this guy and I can still look at it whenever I want. So I was out of there.

The other thing we talked about was BitCloud. So episode 164, March 26th, 2021, I said I signed up to this thing called BitCloud cuz my friend Ryan, Ryan Beagleman called me and he said, this thing looks cool. Let's try it. Um, and so we both, you and I both signed up for it. It was all the rage for a minute.

So BitCloud, Ryan was on that episode, so he, he kind of was pitching it. He called us before, told us to get on, and then he pitched it to us on the episode. So what did he say?

So BitCloud, by the way, it's basically a social, it was basically Twitter, but there was a crypto component where you could buy into someone's, right?

You don't just follow Sam, you basically buy some of the Sam coin, and if Sam is gonna get more popular, other people are going to buy the same coin as well because that's how you kind of subscribe or follow the person. And so you could kind of— we've all had this moment where you see somebody early on, you're like, oh man, this person's awesome, they're going to get big. And Bitcloud was organized such that you could do that. And it also had almost like, because of that, it had a Patreon built in. It's like, oh, I already have all these kind of paying shareholders, I could just create content just for them. Only if you own X amount of my coin, you get to access this content, which is what OnlyFans and then the Twitter Blue subscribers and Patreon, they all do a version of this. So it was like baked in from the start versus usually those are third-party services.

And it was a service. It was one of the very few crypto things I actually thought was interesting. You said, you said, I think you were saying it's interesting because you—

let's do the Ryan one first. So Ryan goes, I remember when Facebook came to my college and we were one of the first colleges. It was really fun. This is the first time I felt like that in a long time. That's why I wanted to come on the show. And then you jumped in and you were like, yeah, two big differences though. One, you didn't have to have money on Facebook. You just, you know, you just go use it. Um, and two, like you're putting money into this thing that we don't know the people behind this. We don't know who, how it's working. Like it's a little nerve-wracking and you don't even, and there was no withdrawal button at the time.

You couldn't even withdraw money from it.

You're like, hey, red flag, money can only go in and it can't come out. And then we were like, nah, don't worry about all that, bro. Like downer over here. Here. And I said, here's my quote. I don't know if this is a scam. It kind of looks scammy to me. And then I had found out who's behind it. They were anonymous at the time, but I had found out who was behind it by asking around. I said, I do know the founders. They're legit people in the tech scene, and they do have a reputation in our circles. And they had, they had raised, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others.

Like, but we had the founder on.

Later we had the founder on and then, and I said, you know, and what I liked about it, I was like, you know, today, um, if I sell on Amazon, I keep 70% of what I, of the value I'm creating being a merchant on Amazon. If I stream on, on, on YouTube, I'm keeping, you know, 70% of what I, what I, um, actually not 70%, more like it's like a 60-40 split of the ad revenue. Twitch, you know, roughly 50%. Then you go down to like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the users at the time captured zero. Like those were multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar companies that the users who created all of the content and consumed all of the content— the users did all of the work to create the value of the network— were getting nothing. And I said, well, it does seem like crypto is kind of cool because it can, it could change that. It can basically reward the people who do the work, who create the content on the, on these networks. And the second thing is we loved the growth hack. So what they had done was they took all the popular Twitter people and they just pre-bought a bunch of their coins. So when I joined, I think there was like $75,000 of value for me to just go claim. And I was like, hmm, okay, push, I'll push that button. Let's see what happens. And and so they had used the money they raised to buy up popular people's coins. And then to, to claim your coins, you had to like sign up for your account and tweet out, hey, I'm verifying my BitCloud. And that was kind of going viral for a bit. And that mechanic worked until it didn't work and BitCloud failed. And we know several people personally, Dharmesh and a few others that invested millions of dollars publicly into BitCloud. And that one, and so, you know, smart people were doing it. It was an interesting idea. Ultimately, that idea failed. And so I would say, you know, we were excited. I was more excited about it than you, for sure. Um, you were like immediately, I think we were pretty much out, correct?

Well, I, I was out, but I liked the idea of it. The idea of it was actually fairly interesting.

Like, I like the free money.

Yeah. Well, no, like Twitter ended up doing it where they just like gave you money. So I get paid. I think $3,000 a year. It's on track for $3,000 a year for tweeting and like getting impressions. That's cool. But you didn't need the crypto component of it.

No, but that's different. You got, you get paid a share of ad revenue. Me for following you, um, early on, kind of being one of your early, early believers for retweeting your content for all that stuff. I couldn't, I couldn't benefit from that.

Right. Yeah. But it's the same outcome for me as, as the creator. I get like, I feel a little bit more bought in.

Well, no, cause like, what was your last Twitter check?

$50, uh, whatever 3,000 divided by 12 is. $300, maybe something like that. $400, maybe.

So let's say you made $400. BitCloud early on when it had, I don't know, 50,000 users or something like that.

Yeah. You were at 75,000.

My account was worth $750,000. Like, uh, you know, I could have, I could have literally pushed the button and cashed that out if I had wanted to.

Dude, I cashed out a little bit of it. Someone bought a bunch from, someone's like, hey, I'll give you Ethereum for all this. And I was like, Yours. I sold it.

So, so, so, the funny thing, do you know there's a new one that's basically the same model and it's crushing right now?

Friends in Tech or something?

Friend Tech. Yeah. I'm not on it right now just because I have been busy with other stuff, but it's, I mean, it's generated like $250 million in revenue as a, like, as a, for the project itself. And I think it's distributed the equal amount to, to, uh, or people have generated that much on it as well.

So then it sounds like Bitcloud— well, let's do an update on Bitcloud, but it sounds like we are wrong about Bitcloud and that Bitcloud didn't work. The idea did work in Friend.Tech, right?

I think I would bet that in the long horizon, let's call it 20 years, um, these networks will be built in with— these networks will, will do this. They will have a currency for the users on the network. And so the users will— the users who contribute to the network will own and control the, the network. So I do believe that that's going to be true. FriendTech, I think, is like another kind of like attempt. I don't think it's probably the one, um, but I do think over the long haul somebody will do that.

So where's BitCloud now? Um, they changed this thing called DeSo, I think, right? The—

yeah, they're doing a bunch of stuff. I don't— I haven't kept up with it, but yeah, BitCloud, they were like, oh, that was just one app on top of the DeSo protocol. And then the DeSo protocol had like many apps, the Diamond app and this app, um, I don't think any, uh, uh, the honest truth is I don't think any of it's gotten off the ground in a, in a meaningful way.

All right. Pick a winner or pick, don't, don't pick a winner. Pick an interesting one.

Okay. An interesting one. Okay. Clout Kitchens. So, um, way back we did an episode. Let me find the episode.

I think we were talking about My Cookie Dealer and a bunch of other, uh, restaurants. No, you weren't there.

So I came over to your office to record one day. You couldn't make it for whatever reason. And you were like, oh, my buddy Stu, who had been kind of listening to some episodes, Stu Iverson, uh, was there and he was I'll jump in. And he jumped in and he had a bunch of ideas. One of the ideas he had was he goes, um, you know how Travis Kalanick has left Uber and he's got this idea of Cloud Kitchen? So he's like, you know, I'm gonna create these restaurants that are just built for Uber Eats, built for DoorDash, and they'll be delivery only. There's no physical location, blah, blah, blah. He goes, well, there's a better— he's— I have another idea. Clout Kitchens. And I was like, Cloud Kitchen? What do you mean? He goes like, You know those social media guys who have clout, you know, they have this, like, you know, they have a big influence. He's like, I think they're gonna open up their own restaurant. Just like, you know, there's Margaritaville and there's, and Gordon Ramsay has his restaurants or whatever. You're gonna see celebrities create their own restaurant brands. Uh, they're just gonna license their name and face to somebody. And then fast forward, like, I don't know, a year, year and a half, MrBeast Burger comes out and MrBeast, one of the biggest social influencers, launches his own virtual restaurant chain exactly as Stu had predicted. And at the beginning it looks great because the launch is insane. There's videos of people just like going and trying to, to order this stuff. And I think it did over $100 million in sort of gross revenue, you know, just sort of purchases from, from Beast Burger in year one. In year one. And so it looked like at the time, damn, Stu called it. Great idea. However, CloudKitchens thing has a couple of issues. One is are you really hard to control quality? Why? Because the way these work are there's just mom-and-pop restaurants and they send the packaging to them. They're like, hey, if an order comes in that's in your area, you're gonna make a burger. Just make whatever burger you normally make. Just try to make a good burger, a good cheeseburger, but wrap it up in this Beast Burger packaging and put it over here. The guy's gonna come pick it up. That's how cloud kitchens work. It just gives existing restaurants extra order flow But because of that, you have total, like, no control over quality because you have, you know, 400 operators each making a different recipe, each with a different, uh, you know, sort of quality control around this. And at some point, MrBeast was like, you do— this is actually bad for my brand. People are ordering, it's like not, not right, it's not good, whatever. I need to distance myself from this. And now they're in a lawsuit with each other because they're like, nope, you signed the— you signed your rights to us. We're going to keep calling it this. And, uh, you're hurting our business by saying that. And so now he can't really talk about it.

So it's not a fail. That's not a failure though. I mean, but it's a failure for him. It poor execution, but it could work. You know, it just so happened he was the biggest, you know, at the time or still is. And it got too big, too fast. That doesn't mean it's a bad, a bad concept.

And I still think if someone's going to do this, you could do this. You just need to like, um, have a much more controlled SKU. So somebody needs to do it with like just like, I don't know, cookies, or they need to do it with a, um, like they need to do like, you know, uh, what's it called, the Edible Eats, Edible Arrangements or whatever. It's like, uh, here's a gift you can send somebody. It's like, you know, you need some celebrity who's going to just like create the version of Edible Arrangements on top of DoorDash or whatever, just like this gifting thing, uh, that's like can be more consistent. So maybe you could just send the final thing to each location.

I think Reed told us on the pod when they launched Beast Burger, he was like, me and Jimmy were just like in a bedroom. We threw it together in 90 days. Like he made it sound like pretty ragtag. Like it was just like, oh, let's just throw it out there and see what happens. I don't, I don't know if that's the truth. That's the kind of the energy that was implied. And, uh, you know, so it just didn't work out for execution reasons, but it could still happen.

Um, okay. Here's one that we were, uh, okay. I'll give you two that I was right, but pessimistic about. So Clubhouse. So I wrote a Twitter thread that was kind of like the thing that blew up my Twitter for a while. I wrote a Twitter thread that basically was telling people why Clubhouse was the hot name at the time. It went from nobody was on it to the cool kids are on it to this is a $2 billion company all the course of less than a year. This thing was just flying. And it was like, oh, this is the next Social Network. And all the big names were believers in this thing. I remember, uh, I remember being like, I enjoyed being on it, but I was like, oh, this is not going to work for certain reasons. And then I would hear really smart people, you know, Marc Andreessen invest in this thing, Andrew Chen, you know, the social guy, oh, he's investing in this thing. Then you hear Naval who's an investor in it and he's like, um, this will be bigger than Twitter. And then, uh, you know, Sahil from Gumroad, I remember listening to him on a Clubhouse thing and he's like, 'Clubhouse will be bigger than Twitter because everybody can speak and not everybody can write.' And I was like, 'That's not how this works. You can't just be like, my app is called Breathe and everybody breathes, so I'm going to be the most valuable company.' I was like, 'What is this logic?' And I wrote this thread. I said, 'Hey, everybody thinks Clubhouse could be the next big thing. I think it's going to fail and here's how I think it goes down.' I wrote this thread. The thread goes viral.

Yeah, you had celebrities reach out. Isn't that how you met, uh, Hasan Minhaj? And who else?

Yeah, so, uh, there was a bunch of people that were like, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to like name drop, you know what I mean? But like, yeah, there was, it was crazy. It was people that I admired.

Yeah, it was like your heroes. I don't, I mean, like, I like some of these podcasts, the sports podcast, uh, guys.

Yeah, people who were famous, you know, authors or, or writers or whatever, either followed or DM'd being like, that's what, that was so, so good. So I was like, wow, that was great. But I also got blocked by a bunch of VCs who were in— Marc Andreessen blocks me. They're like, you know, you know, they go from following to blocking like instantaneously. Why? Because I like, you know, I told them that maybe their investment wouldn't work out. And, and I got some hate. Some people were like, oh, why are you rooting for a startup to fail? I didn't say I'm rooting for it.

You actually in the thing you said, I don't want them to fail. I just have experience in this space and it doesn't— I don't think it's going to turn out nicely.

Yeah, but I think rightfully so people don't believe that where it's like, look, I wish you the best. They say that like when they're fighting, like, look, I wish you good luck. And it's like, no, you don't. But I think, you know, fast forward, I don't know when that was. I think that was 2021. So fast forward 2 years now. And, uh, I feel like not just was I right that Clubhouse failed step by step, because I was like, this is what they're going to do. They're going to realize that this doesn't like that. They can't grow the thing this way. They're going to then launch a recording feature because they're going to say, ah, You're missing the live show. Just record it. We're gonna optimize towards people creating shows versus people just hanging out and they're gonna try recording and then no one's gonna watch the recordings. And then here's what they're gonna do. They're gonna be like, we looked at the data and actually, yeah, people don't watch these recordings cuz the, what makes a great live show isn't as good in a, isn't a well-edited recording. Um, so then they're gonna be like, you know who really uses this? People who hang out and make friends on this. And we're gonna switch to a hangout product. And sure enough, they switched to a Hangout product and they did basically each of the steps except for the last one, which I predicted was like, you know, they end up sort of fire selling it to Facebook for, you know, whatever, $70 million. And then he becomes a product manager at Facebook. Like, you know, that part hasn't, hasn't happened yet. Um, but pretty much step by step. So that one was, was a right, but pessimistic. And, uh, you know, I guess one takeaway is it doesn't really matter to be right when it's pessimistic. There's nothing really that great comes of it.

You know, you kind of look like an asshole even if you're right.

Yeah, exactly. I'm like, and then I'm like, oh great. Now I'm like, yeah, I told you they would fail. It's like, oh, okay.

Speaking of things that you say that you don't really mean, did I tell you about that time that a kid flew in from England?

No. What?

One time when The Hustle was getting started, this kid called me from England. He goes, I love The Hustle. And I was like, all right, let's talk. I started talking to him and we just bullshit. At the end I go, yeah, if you're ever in SF, just let me know and we'll help you out. And I meant it as like a way to end the conversation. And I learned at that moment, you should never say that. I get a message 3 weeks later and he goes, hey Sam, it's the guy from England. Um, so my flight lands, my flight lands tomorrow. And he just shows up and we have HustleCon, like my big event, and we make him work the whole event. And we're like, here, you could sleep on our couch. And we dress him up in a Texas outfit. He had never been to America before. We gave him cowboy boots and a hat that we had in the office. And we called him Texas Sam the whole weekend. And he stayed with us for like 5 days, all because on the phone I was like, yeah, you know? So now I don't say those things anymore. If I don't mean it, I try not to say it.

Wait, why? That sounds like an amazing experience. That sounds awesome.

Well, it was only— no, it could have been, it could have been bad.

That's a lemonade outta lemons situation for you.

Um, well, it, it was, it, it could have been horrible. What was the other one? You had 2. Was it Theracios?

Theracios. Yeah. So Theracios was this company that was buying up all the, uh, buying— it was a rollup. An aggregator of Amazon, Amazon Brands, Amazon FBA.

One of the fastest growing startups ever. I think they went from zero to a billion dollars in market cap or valuation in like 12 months.

And tons of revenue and then tons of copycats because everyone was like, oh, Thrasyo, one of the fastest growing startups in the world. We're going to repeat this.

And, um, and we had friends who did it too. Some of our friends went and did the same thing where they bought a bunch of Amazon businesses.

May they rest in peace. Uh, but it didn't work, right? That was the problem. So, you know, uh, I remember calling Andrew Wilkinson, and I was like, yeah, what do you think about this Thrasyo stuff? And I was like, I was like, I kind of get it because, you know, they're doing, you know, like roll— I think roll-ups in general are just like a, a really nice blueprint for a business. This roll-up kind of makes sense. Andrew had done a semi-roll-up with Shopify apps. And so I was like, do you see this as like, you know, a really good opportunity? What do you think? And he goes, I think they're picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. And I had never heard that before, but I guess that's a phrase, uh, like a, like a Charlie Munger type phrase.

If Andrew says anything interesting, it most likely came from Charlie Munger. That's his hero. Uh, and Charlie is like, has wonderful phrases. So most of the stuff, most of the wisdom he has is from Charlie Munger.

And I go, what do you mean? And he's like, it's like picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. Like, you know, you're going to pick them up. You're picking up these little kind of like what seems like these little cheap, free, cheap assets. And you think it's all going well. Until you get completely run over. And if you fast forward till today, that's pretty much exactly what played out. These guys bought up a bunch of businesses, they rolled up what looked like a lot of revenue, and then they got run over. And at the time, we did an episode, and the things we had said were basically, um, so I basically took Andrew's point of view, and I was like, that does feel more right than the other way. And I said, well, what, what could be the problems? And I was like, Basically, these FBA businesses are not very durable. So if you're going to do a roll-up, you kind of want durability to be one of the highest characteristics. Like normally in business, we think growth is the best thing, but actually when you're buying businesses, it's more about not being wrong than it is about everything going right. And so you want durability when you're rolling these up.

They bought trash. They bought like, they would buy like, um, um, one of the thousand vendors on Amazon selling Chinese dog leashes. For $25. You know what I mean? Like they, I think they bought trash.

So like, you know, Amazon, uh, is not durable for many reasons. Number one, uh, the, you know, like the, your, your spot in the rankings for these commodity products really matters. And like, it's a constant battle to keep, to get your ranking to stay high, which includes things like people going and leaving fake reviews on your thing so that your account gets taken down. Like, oh, let me just spam you with reviews so that Amazon detects you and then delists you. Right. That's shit like that. Or copycats or people who pay more or whatever. Then there's Amazon themselves launching Basics. So for every good category, Amazon's like, cool, here's the Amazon Basic. I know, what do you know, it's at the top, right? Like that was also happening. Then there was the last thing, the sort of the death blow, which is Andrew at Tiny, they sort of believe what I think a few other of these like holdco types believe, which is that synergies are massively overrated. That like, it's very easy to talk yourself into. We're going to buy these 5 companies and then synergy. And it's like, what synergy? It's like, um, we're going to centralize the back office and we're going to, uh, cross-promote with each other. It's like, no, actually none of these brands had enough brand love for you to cross-promote anything. Nobody trusted you. Um, the synergies in the back office actually just turned into like a bunch of people not really watching what was going on in these individual businesses the way they were when it was just one person owning them.

So what's the update on them?

So Thrasio is basically dead. Um, it's, I don't know, I don't know exactly what the stage is. Is it, it's either a fire sale, bankruptcy, but it's dead. And so are all of the aggregators. And so now there's like the opposite phenomenon. There's like a deloading, and which is actually probably a better opportunity to go pick the best 10 assets from all these aggregators who are completely underwater and they just have to, you know, basically get rid of all these assets. And so, um, yeah, Thrasio and all the Thrasio copycats did not work out.

All right, I'll tell you one that we, uh, I wasn't exactly right, and the times that this turned out to be true, it didn't play out how I thought it was going to. So some, something that I talked to you about, I think since 2019, 2020, was privacy. So if you look back on some of our episodes when we were still in the old office, so this was 2019, I had this insight from the founder of Pandora. So Pandora is the music service The founder one time told me, he was like, yeah, like mo— many of our users are like middle of America, like dentists who like have Pandora playing in the background. And what we've noticed about them is they sometimes won't sign up because they don't want to click the link that says they agree to our terms and services and our privacy statements. And to me, that meant the average Joe cares more about privacy than a lot of people think. At the time, 2019, privacy wasn't that big of a thing where You just click yes no matter what. I think that that— and so I predicted there's going to be a lot of businesses that are going to be created on top of that. Another example that I had was DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is a privacy search engine that doesn't like track you in the same way Google does. Their searches have gone up like crazy and the business has gone on to raise $100 million, of which most of it I believe was a secondary sale. So they're quietly killing it. But I thought that this was going to be more popular than it has been. It's kind of gotten popular because TikTok, uh, so I think in Minnesota it is, or, uh, Montana it is, uh, they have banned or trying to ban TikTok for privacy reasons. They're mostly doing it because they don't like China, not because necessarily— so this is where I was wrong. They're doing it for the Chinese purpose, not exactly the privacy purpose. But I thought that this was by now going to be a lot more popular than it is.

It's slowly growing, but we don't care if you give up all your data, but you better give it up to an American company. Yeah, you better give it up to us.

Yeah, so that has— that we didn't— I didn't nail that yet, but I'm still, I'm still holding out. But I thought by now it would have picked up a little bit, but it hasn't.

So I'm gonna give you one that, uh, we got right and wrong at the same time, meaning we did an episode back in 2020, July of 2020. COVID has been like raging for 3 months. and we do an episode called Is GPT-3 the Next Big Thing? Episode number 94. We're like in 500 now. This is 94. And we had gotten access to this tool called GPT-3, which at the time you had to get an API key. You had to borrow that. You had to get a friend to get you an invite to get GPT-3.

And it wasn't that good. It was okay.

We were pretty stunned by it, mostly because we're 12-year-olds and we Like made it write like a rap song in the form of Cardi B for us. And we were like, this is hilarious. This is amazing. It just wrote a rap. Like this rap is actually good.

I said, write a rap by Cardi B. And the title of the rap was Walk That Plank. And it was a very long, it was like, it had rhymes as if Cardi B was saying it. It was very, very wacky.

And we were both so impressed and we were like, this is amazing. And we were, we were basically like, hey, this is super cool. Uh, blah, blah, blah. And we, so we correctly back in July 2020, before ChatGPT became the fastest growing product of all time, before OpenAI became a $100 billion company, before AI was the trend, we said, we released an episode with the title, is GPT-3 the next big thing? Answer was yes. However, I count this as an L. Why? Because we just giggled about the rap lyrics and didn't do shit else.

We didn't do anything about it.

You know, the move. The, the optimal move was drop everything and go work for OpenAI.

It's the second optimal move, which you said, you said in one of the episodes, you said, if I'm smart, I should drop everything and go work in that area.

And I'm not smart, turns out, right? Then I proved to myself that I was not smart. I could have, there was 100 ways to make $100 million with this. I could have started a company using GPT-3 as the, the backbone, which the guys from Jasper did. They were like, oh, let's use this to help marketers write blog posts, write tweetstorms, write, uh, captions, write anything.

That story needs to play out still though.

Yeah, but they built a company that like got to one of the fastest growing companies I've ever seen. Like getting ARR over $50 million in one year is like insane. And so could have started a company, could have gone and worked for OpenAI, could have invested in the OpenAI spinouts like Anthropic, which is now a $20 billion company, or, you know, name the— go through the list. Could have, um, what else could I have done? I could have just, yeah. So between investing, starting a company, or joining a company, there was a lot of different ways to capitalize on that opportunity that we identified. But I didn't. And I think this has happened, you know, many times where you sort of like, you, the opportunity, you know, the elephant in the room is the opportunity and you just sort of like, oh, that's cool. There's an elephant over there. Versus being like, oh my God, wait, stop everything I'm doing and let me reassess what I'm doing in order to—

What's this analogy? Do you kill the elephant? Are you going to kill the elephant?

Look, look, you know how it is with analogies on the fly. Sometimes you got to weave two and two together.

Do you kill the elephant? We got to kill—

Sometimes the elephant needs to strike while the iron's hot. And now you got an elephant that's striking iron, right?

Like we don't know what this is going to do. And the elephant's in Rome, my friend.

It's like that Michael Scott That Michael Scott episode of The Office where he's like, sometimes I just start a sentence and I have no idea where it's going to go. That's podcasting for you.

Okay. So, uh, let me preface this. I, one of the things I like to take pride in is either hiring people because before they get like, uh, before they kind of reach their, the pinnacle of their career. I also like this on the podcast when we find interesting people and we talk about them A lot of times they're still popular, but we got 'em, we got 'em before the curve. One of 'em was Andrew Huberman. We interviewed Andrew Huberman. I forget exactly when, but when I remember when he interviewed us, he was just using his AirPod headphones, looking into his laptop. Like it looked like he was in a, like a bathroom or something. Like he like was like, as if he was like ran to like some room, you know, it wasn't like a big deal. So that one was a cool one.

So I got somebody here that this is all you. So you come on the episode one day and you go, you know this guy Brian Johnson? I'm like, nah, not really. You're like, you know, Venmo? I'm like, yeah, of course. And you're like, well, it's owned by a company called Braintree. You know Braintree? I'm like, vaguely, payments company, something. And you go, listen to this guy's story. So this guy's story is basically Brian Johnson. I'm not gonna do his whole life story, but like interesting kind of early on door-to-door sales type of guy ends up creating a tech company. Braintree buys Venmo, sells Braintree to PayPal for like $700, $800 million. Creates this like Neuralink type of thing, this brain reader. And you're like, but forget all that. I'm like, forget all that? That was a lot. That was amazing. You're like, forget all of it. Go to this website, blueprint.brianjohnson.com. And I go and it's like size 6 font. It looks like I'm reading from a, like a textbook. And you're like, this guy's measuring every part of his body, every single organ. Um, he is measuring it and then he is optimizing it and he's doing crazy shit. And look at this. He's been doing this for like a year. And I had never heard of this. Most people had never heard of this. Bryan Johnson, now I would say, I think he's kind of tipped where actually in the tech industry, everybody knows about him.

Yeah. But even some mainstream people, they'll call him the guy who's trying not to die or something like that.

Yeah. Oh, that guy. Yeah, I've seen him. He looks weird. Right? Because I bring him up in every conversation I can find an excuse to because he's fascinating. And people are like, that's great. Oh, I just don't feel like that's going to work. Right? But it's a very polarizing thing. But you found this early and you were watching him. You were like talking about it. Then we got him on the pod early on. He's great. And we're about to release another episode. I went to his house. We've recorded another one. But like, I feel like you spotted— this was your uber angel investment, right? You spotted Bryan Johnson way before anybody else was really paying attention to him.

Let me explain the story. It's been long enough. I can tell the story finally. Here's how I found out about Bryan. I can't name names. I have a friend. That was going on a first date with this lady he had just met. And he goes, hey, Sam, I'm going to take this lady. She seems awesome. I want to take her on a first date. I'm going to take her. I have a little plane. I want to take her up in the plane and we're going to fly around F1. You know, F1 was in Austin. We're going to go above the stadium. It's going to be an ordeal. Would you and Sarah like to come on this double date? I would love it if you'd come. We said, yeah, sure. Sarah gets sick and I text him. I go, hey, man, Sarah's not in anymore. But I'll still go. And so I go third wheel. I third wheel on this date and we go on this date and she's a lovely woman, whatever. And she wasn't trying to be cool, but I was trying to hype up my buddy and I go, hey lady, have you ever been in a plane on a first date? Like, this is pretty cool. She wasn't trying to dampen the mood or, you know, like rub it in this guy's face. But she goes, oh yeah, you know, this other guy used to date it. He, he liked to fly and we're like, huh? So we asked a few more questions and we're like, what does he fly? And she named some jet that's like a $40 billion or $40 million jet. And we're like, what? And she's, and then she says something like, yeah, but he likes to fly it himself, but he has a staff. And we're like, who the hell is this guy? And so I Google it, like who this person is. And that's how I find Brian. It was, she used to date him and that's how I find out about him. I just start Googling and I come across Blueprint that he just launched a few weeks prior and I'm like, right, this guy's amazing. That's how I found Brian Johnson.

How did that date go though?

It didn't work out.

Horrific decision by you to join the date.

I joined the date, dude. It's them, it's them two in the front two seats and me in the back. And I have the headset, but I'm like putting my hands over there like, hey guys, like, uh, It was so funny. I had never been up in a plane like that.

I was like, "Can I pass this up?

Can I still go?" And I was pipping him up the whole time. I was like, "Hey, guy, have you told lady about that one time you did this amazing thing?" But you're doing it through the plane headset thing, which is like you have to yell. Yeah, but I'm still leading up.

Like, "Hey, how about the—" Yeah.

Did you tell her about the time that you paid for everyone's dinner? It was $2,000. Roger. Yeah, I'm like, I'm trying to like pimp them up while I'm wearing this headset.

You're like pointing out like, hey, we could go there next week.

It's like, hey, guy, did you tell lady about the time that you had the box seats at the F1 and you took all of your friends because you're so nice? Yeah, it was like that type of thing. It didn't work out though. I tried my best, guy. I'm sorry. You know who you are if you're listening to this.

That's, uh, that's hilarious. You, um, you had a couple more on here. I don't know if you have time, but you had a couple more in here that looked kind of interesting. So you had, uh, do paid communities, and then what's this inertia one?

Let's do inertia. Okay, so you, uh, this was, you, you, you talk a lot. Uh, that's no surprise, but every once in a while you say something that's pretty profound. One of the profound things that you said, it stuck with me. This was in 2021, March of 2021. You had this episode, uh, where you, it's just called Inertia, I believe. And you said, um, inertia explains like, uh, inertia explains why 90% of people are doing what they're doing. In my life, I've had moments where I realized inertia is a bitch. Inertia is the reason why I'm doing these things. Not be— not actually because I want to, but because of inertia. And oftentimes I've gotta check myself. And ask myself, am I really doing the right things? And I think that you were referring to a business that you had previously sold where it wasn't doing that well. And you're like, do I even believe this is a big opportunity? Would I even be doing this if I weren't already doing it? Would I have hired these same people? Would I work with these same people? The answer, uh, at the time was hell no. And that's when you decided to get out. So my question is, A, no question, comment. That was good. That was a really good insight. But question number 2, You've since sold a business, so you started and sold a business, I think post this comment. Yep. Do you still use, like, do you still think about inertia?

All the time. And by the way, this, uh, this came to me because—

Oh, you think about inertia.

Yeah. It's like the Roman Empire for some guys. For me, it's inertia. Um, this happened because I had a come to Jesus moment. I, uh, I was with our buddy Suli and we went to, we used to go in San Francisco, if you drive like 30 minutes down, uh, south out of San Francisco. There's these casinos that are like half casinos. Yeah. So we go down there and we're hanging out, we're playing, we're having a good time. At the end of the night, he's like, so why are you— he's like, so I don't get what you're doing. And I go like, casino? What are you talking about? He's like, no, no, no, this whole thing you were— because I was at Monkey Inferno at the time. And to the outside, what I was doing was the greatest job ever. If anybody had ever seen, you've seen our office at Monkey Inferno. It was literally the nicest office you have ever been to in your life.

I called it a billionaire's playground is what it was.

And that's what it was. Uh, he literally built his, a billionaire literally built his dream office and we just got to use it. There's a chef every day and there's a gym and there's a, but it's like for only the 15 people that we were there that it was a very small office.

Yeah. And then you had 20 or 15, you had 20 or 15 engineers who are paid really nicely and you could just do whatever you want.

And the job was, Sean, you get to come up with any idea you want. Here's a team of super talented engineers to build them and designers. Here's the funding. You never have to go raise funding. You, you get paid salary and you own the equity. Um, you could, by the way, you don't even wanna do, you don't wanna focus on one, go ahead, do 4 at a time, build 4 at a time. You have enough resources, go ahead, do everything, right? And I'm 25 years old when he, uh, 24 years old when he names me CEO and At 24, that was the greatest opportunity, the greatest experience ever. At 25, incredible opportunity. Then I was 29 and I was still doing the same thing, except for now the pressure of like succeeding. Like at the beginning was like, dude, this is going to be awesome. We're going to, we have so many shots on goal, we're going to do it. Then we took a lot of shots on goal and we made some good things happen, but no big huge win. Which is what we were all going for. And by the end, we were really trying to like force a square peg into a round hole. It just wasn't working. But our mandate was like, build the next Twitter, build the next Snapchat. It's like, dude, that's really fucking hard to do. But like, okay, we're gonna keep trying. And so I got this talented team in this beautiful office. I'm CEO, I'm getting paid well, I got equity, I got everything you would want. And here's my best friend, the guy I looked up to saying, What the hell are you doing? And I was like, he's looking at me like I'm a junkie. Like, dude, what are you doing with your life? And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is amazing. Of course this is amazing.

Right? And he's like, you told me how much money you made back then. And I think it was like low six figures, like over, it was over $100,000, but less than $200,000. And I remember when you told me that I was like, I was making $160,000 at the time.

Yeah.

I was like, that's the most money of anyone I know. Like you have $100,000. Like that way it was huge. I remember you told me that money, that amount. And I was like, you're so rich.

It was huge to me too. I was like, this is amazing. And then I was like, and if any of these ideas hit, this is great. So he's talking to me, he's just like, I feel— he's like, I feel like you're just doing the same thing over and over again and not getting the results you want. And I was like, he's— he basically asked me a very simple question. He's like, you know, um, if you weren't already working on this project, if I just took the project away, if tomorrow this whole company had to fold because, oh, they forgot to pay their bills and whatever, this folded tomorrow, would you pick up the phone, would you call these same people and say, hey, we're still doing this idea, right? That's the biggest idea we could possibly think of. It's the one we must do. Would you call these same people to work on the same idea? And my answer was yes, the same people. Hell no, not the same idea. He's like, he's— and I was like, that's kind of a shitty realization to have. It's like I was like, am I an idiot? And he's like, no. He's like, this is common. He's like, inertia is a bitch. And he's like, almost all of us are just doing what we're doing because we were already doing it. And like this, this even happens with investments. After we got acquired, I got a bunch of Amazon stock. And so my portfolio was like super skewed towards Amazon. I was, you know, all of a sudden here's millions of dollars of Amazon stock. Okay. If, if you had just given me the millions of dollars, I wouldn't have put all of it into Amazon only, but because it was already there, I was like, should I sell Amazon? I don't know. It's a good company. Right? It's like because it was already there, my decision was totally different than if I had just re-underwritten the decision from scratch, saying, if I, if I just had this money today, is this exactly how I would allocate it? The same thing happens in your portfolio as happens in the time of your life. Like, would I, would I allocate my energy and my talents to this project, or am I just doing it because I've been doing it? If I'm just doing it because that's what I'm already doing. And I think the sad answer is that for most people, they're doing what they're doing because they're already doing it. It's not the thing that if they had a blank slate today, they would just go back and recreate this.

That's the same argument my wife gave to me about selling HubSpot stock. I've not sold any. And she was like, well, would you buy this stock anyway? My argument was, well, first of all, I, I do like the company, but do I like it enough to have that much of my portfolio in it? I don't know. But my argument is like, well, but I don't want to pay taxes. And frankly, I'm not sure if that's a good argument or not. Um, but I, I am a victim of it as well. Yeah.

Yeah, of course. There's that, right? There's nuances to some of these things, but like that same principle just applies to a lot of parts of your life. A lot of people are in relationships they don't want to be in because they're already in the relationship. They're in jobs they don't want to be in because they're, they're in it. And, uh, and I just kind of had this, like, it was 2 AM and I'm in this Chinese casino and my friend is telling me this thing. And I remember we drove to our office, I badge in at like 2:30 in the morning. We go to the whiteboard and we say, We're going to spend the next hour trying to figure out if we can actually make this company work. And if at the end of this hour we don't look at a plan on this whiteboard that we feel is like, this is going to work, like, I believe that this is worth a shot, then I'm going to sell this company like tomorrow. I'm just going to get out of this company. And then at the end of that hour, we looked at it. We were like, this is— I mean, these are all just like random long shots that like we can't sit here and say we have a ton of conviction in. And then like the next day I talked to our main investor. I said, I think it's time to shake it up. Like, I need to shake up something in my life. This is all beautiful. This is amazing. I can't believe you gave me this experience, but like, I don't want this anymore. Let's either sell the company or you should replace me or something. Something's got to change. I can't unhear what I heard last night. And, uh, I have a lot of flaws, but the one good thing I have is that once I hear the truth, I just act on it. Like, I just agree that like, I've heard the truth now and that's it. There's no going back from that. Whereas I think some people will see or hear the truth and then they'll go into denial or they'll delay. And I don't do denial or delay.

That's a good one. Um, yeah, I always, um, I thought that that line inertia is a bitch. I remember that one. So I had to bring that one up. Um, maybe the last one is paid communities. So I've been interested. There's a, if you listen closely over the last 550 episodes, there's like 2 to 3 things that I've like have been obsessed about. And I knew I was going to act on one of them. I acted on one of them. It's a paid community.

So, by the way, can you say the 2 or 3? What are the, what would be the 2 or 3?

I, I, uh, helping people find jobs. So I call it job boards. It's beyond that, but I've always been fascinated by that. Um, and then creating, um, like, um, somewhat related, but I was, I've always been fascinated by the trucking industry or other like blue collar essential jobs that aren't, don't have a lot of technology or software in order to help them be more efficient. So those are like 2 or 3 things that I've always really liked. And then of course, B2B media companies and database and research businesses. But the other one that I really loved was paid communities. And if you listen closely, starting in 2020, I did a lot of breakdowns on different paid communities. So I mentioned Tiger 21, Vistage, which has since sold. So I talked about Vistage. A lot of people didn't know what Vistage is. It's like similar to what Hampton does, similar to what YPO does, but the target market is CEOs and business owners of like plumbing companies in the middle of America. Doesn't sound that huge, but it has since sold for about $1.8 billion, I think about 8 or 10 months ago. It was doing— now it's doing close to $500 million a year in sales, very profitable. And so I talked about paid communities and I talked about TIRE21, a few other ones. Here's the— I made a list of pros and cons back in 2020. So this was March 2020. And I'll tell you if I think the pros and cons are true since I've now run Hampton for about one year. So pros of paid, paid communities, they can grow quickly. They seemed fun to run. If you're interested in the topic, you don't need a lot of money to start 'em. They definitely seem profitable. Um, and then the cons were, uh, a lot of times they don't scale that well. I think churn could be pretty, pretty high. Uh, and those were like my two main cons. So the truth is, is that they can grow quickly, but you don't want them to grow quick, quickly. You want them to grow slowly. So I was a little bit wrong about that. Can you start them with zero money? Zero dollars? Yes. I started Hampton with no money. Uh, we didn't even buy a website or a domain name. Um, can they be very profitable? Yes. The answer is yes, they can. Um, what I got wrong or didn't mention was how meticulous you have to be about growth. And they can get big, but they just take longer. And that's okay because I think if they take long, usually not always, if something takes longer to grow, Maybe that means that it's gonna die, is less likely to die quickly. Example, Theracios grew quickly, probably is gonna die very quickly. There's a lot of examples of that. And so it has in fact proven to be a big business, or it can be a big business. It's harder to grow than I thought, but not because of demand, but because you don't want it to grow quickly. You need it to grow slowly. You have to be really thoughtful. So I underestimated how challenging that is. Um, but I did a lot of the work in front of people. I, I, I would've thought that someone was gonna launch this.

I even interviewed, uh, the funny thing is, the funny thing is you, you invited a couple of other paid community CEOs on the pod as guests, asked them 100 questions, and then took their lunch. And I just find that to be an incredible story that I look forward to telling, uh, as this plays out.

I, I need it to work. Uh, I need to work first. At the time, you had a community called Club LTV. Which was an e-com community. I think it was making $100,000 a month pretty much right away. I think you actually— that name is wonderful.

It was, it was free. I didn't charge for it, but it was like invite only. Like I basically that was I was running an e-commerce business, but I'm part-time in it and I've never done e-commerce before. And so I have a strategy of like, if I'm going to do something that I don't know how to do, There are hacks to learn faster. One of the hacks is surround yourself with other people who are doing the, playing the same game at 1 to 2 levels above where you're playing it, meaning they're 1 to 2 notches better at it than you are and further along than you are. And so when we wanted to grow big on, on Twitter, I think both of us had a similar idea. We created a group, a text messaging group called the 100K Club, and we invited 6 people who all had that same goal, and then we all talked in there about initially like stuff we were doing to make that happen. Then we all just became friends. But like immersion into a small club of people who play the same or playing the same game at a 1 or 2 notch higher level than you is one of the, one of the hacks to get better at something faster. And so Club LTV was cool. If I just create a curated group of awesome e-commerce owners, I'm going to learn a bunch of shit that I need to know to make my own thing successful. So I'm not even charging these people. Um, because I don't need to make money off this. I want the information. I actually wanted the network from it. And that's exactly what I got out of it. But you made money through advertising.

Um, and so you had sponsors. Yeah. And that model actually works. So there's a company called Aventa who does this, but they did it with like chief information officers. So these are like Fortune 500 and they were making, um, they, they sold for 17 times profit for $250 million. So they're making, I think, $50 million in revenue. And then whatever that profit is, I can't do that math. Um, but they, so, so that model that you had, it works. The downside, which I don't think you, you knew getting into it, logistically there is a, it's, it's a very operationally heavy business. It's very, very challenging. Uh, it's not, e-com is also operationally heavy, but it's more so like there's like 3 or 4 things that you have to nail with people. There's like way more things. There's like people's feelings that you have to like account for and it's a little bit more of an art and it's actually quite challenging to hire, uh, help for that type of business. But you were onto something. And I actually think ClubLTV, I think that one was a business that could have totally worked.

Uh, me and Ben, I remember we just had a conversation like, hey, do we want to actually turn this into a business? It can, it'll work. It would be profitable. We just saw better opportunities for ourselves. Uh, but like, that's one where if I knew the right person, I would have totally just handed over ClubLTV, uh, ClubLTV and be like, you're the operator of this now. Uh, there's a clear path to make this a business. There's like one called eCommerce Fuel that's out there.

That's kind of, Like the, which I love, older version of this. I was a paying subscriber.

Really? Why? Why, why did you, you didn't do e-commerce? I just thought it was awesome.

Uh, Andrew, the guy who started it, I used to read his blog and I thought it was sick. It was $300 a year, I think. He listens to the pod. I, I, and I talk to him every once in a while. I just thought it was cool. I thought e-commerce fuel was great. In fact, I was a paying member in Moiz Ali, this very rich, successful guy. Sorry, Moiz, I'm gonna blow your cover. He used to use my account 'cause he didn't want to pay $300 a year to— he, he would use my— we would share a password. Uh, so like it's pretty funny, but I liked e-commerce fuel. I thought it was great. It's still a thing and he limits it to 3,000 people, I think, right?

Uh, something like that. I don't, I, I don't actually use it 'cause it's a forum and I don't really love like forums and there's like live events or whatever. I, I like the way we did it with Club LTV. I thought that was more, more fun and easier, just easier to, to like actually participate in. Um, so anyways, I thought that, uh, yeah, that definitely could have been a business. Uh, just, you know, you gotta pick and choose opportunities.

So long story short, uh, what do you think is the—

what's your takeaway from this? So like, what do you, uh— okay, we made a bunch of predictions, we go back, we look, we see what we were right about, what we were wrong about. What's your— to the Chris Barling question that I love— what's the right lesson to learn out of this?

The right lesson to learn. There's a few. The number one is we, we make money talking about this stuff and that's great. You could say we make a great living doing that. I feel like a puss for not acting on some of these things. I guess I acted on one, but like there's been 5 or 10 or 20 things where you've told me and I'm like, that's cool. I should go in on that. Mainly there's only been 3 things that I've gone in on, which is TRT, but like Fuck, we talked about OpenAI. We should have put our money, I think you have in a few cases, but I should have put my money where my mouth was a little bit more. So that's one lesson, which is predictions aren't that easy or aren't that terribly hard. Having the courage in them is hard.

Mine is the exact same thing, which is that the predictions that matter are the ones where you notice something early before everybody notices it, but then you like that's, you know, it was kind of cliché, right? Ideas are kind of cheap and execution. No, no, the idea is actually quite valuable. However, it's potential energy. You got to turn the potential energy into kinetic energy. How do you do that? Through like motion, right? So it's like chasing it down and actually doing something with it is, um, is where all the value gets created. And me and Ben have actually figured out a little bit of a better way to do this, both through like actually having like vehicles to invest in these things, but also we just continually stop and ask ourselves, like, I think in the last 6 months there's probably been 2 or 3 times where we say, what's the thing that we see right now that 3, 4, you know, 3 years from now we're going to be like, dude, we talked about that. That was in front of our face. Why didn't we just go and meet the guy? Why didn't we go and invest in the thing? Why didn't we start one? Whatever it is, right? And so by asking that question regularly, like, what's the thing that's actually hidden in plain sight right now for us? I think I'm going to like turn that dial from like, uh, missing a bunch of these opportunities to taking advantage of them.

We should do a whole episode on what those things are. Yeah.

Yeah, I will. I'll tell you the way I learned that, by the way, was I met this guy, Anamitra, and Anamitra came to my office and he was the first product manager at Twitter. And I was like, tell me what it was like back then. He's like, well, there's like, I don't know, 12 people in the company. Uh, I joined, uh, you know, 15 people, something like that. I joined and I was like, was it obvious at the time that like Twitter was going to become Twitter? He's like, no, no, no, not at all. Twitter was kind of interesting, but looked pretty frivolous and useless. People were texting out what they were eating. There was no app at the time. You just texted this number, like 44444 or whatever, whatever you were having for lunch. And in Silicon Valley, people were kind of having fun with it a little bit, but it didn't seem like a serious— He's like, I had job offers from Microsoft or whatever. I had serious opportunities. And then here was this Twitter thing. Even the name sounded frivolous. And he's like, um, but I had learned one important lesson, which is that whenever you see like a phenomenon of behavior, meaning you see people acting in a way that seems strange, weird, or inexplicable or irrational, the natural reaction is to just write it off, be like, I don't know, those are weirdos, that, that makes no sense, idiots, and move on. And he's like, what I've learned is, now he's a VC, and he's like, as a VC and as, at the time, and he's like, thank God in my career I realized that, which was when you realize, when you see that weird behavior that you don't understand, the thing is not to, the thing not to do is label it and write it off. It's to lean in and try to understand it. He's like, so I saw that people were like, like, why would you text out what you're eating right now? Like, what do you, why? And why do, why do you like to see what other people are saying in that same way? Like, That seems completely like strange behavior, but people are doing it. He's like, anytime you see strange behavior and people doing it, like, that's usually the, the inner, that's what an amazing opportunity actually looks like. And since he told me that, I then saw that many times over. Like, we got acquired by Twitch. I remember in college walking into my, the dorm room, the guy next to me who lived next to me, and he was watching like a replay of someone playing a StarCraft tournament. And I was like, you are King Dork. Not only is StarCraft on your screen right now, you are not even playing. You are watching some guy in Korea play this game. That is literally like the dorkiest, dumbest thing I didn't— and I literally made fun of him for like a year. Later, when we got acquired and he's like, oh, you're head of esports at Twitch now. He was like, he literally was like, you fuck. He called me and he was like, you used to make fun of me for this. And I was like, dude, I agree. I was totally dumb and wrong.

I should have— by the way, I don't even play games, but I watch people on YouTube playing. Yeah.

And I was like, I should have leaned in. Why would somebody do this behavior that seems completely irrational? Why would somebody watch someone else play video games on the other side of the earth through this replay that he had to download? At the time, there was no Twitch. At the time, it's like he had to download this thing off the server for 8 hours and then watch it at night. and I was like, weird, I don't want to hear it. And then of course, you know, so missing that 5 times has taught me like lean into that. Like, and I just remembered the OpenAI example, by the way, Sam Altman, president of YC, right? He is, he had the best job in Silicon Valley. President of YC was the best job of Silicon, in Silicon Valley at the time. YC is probably the most like value generative company at the time. Or like organization. He's the president. He got picked over anybody else and he left to go join an AI nonprofit.

I was like, wow.

Yeah, you're like, something's up. These billionaires are putting $100 million into this AI research company, this nonprofit. Why would they do that? And again, I was just like, weird. Sam Parr doing a weird, inexplicable thing. Instead, I should have been like, hey, the smartest guy in Silicon Valley just left the most prestigious job in Silicon Valley to do this thing that sounds sort of like strange to me, lean in. And, uh, yeah, that's the lesson I would share, my takeaway of this whole thing.

Let me wrap up with one quick thing. I forgot, I should have said this earlier, but we did this episode about this guy. I think he was in India and we called him in and he like talked to us without his video on. And I found him because he had this website called UberPro. I think it was called uber.pro. And I've Googled his name. I Googled his name last night. I can't find him anywhere online.

Oh, he's gone.

I can't find him anywhere. And if anyone can find him, please do this. This would be amazing. I want to see what he's up to now. He was 23 years old or even younger. And what I did was I gave him $1,000 and he gave me $10,000 in Uber credit. And for like years, I took an Uber Black everywhere because what he did was I think this is how it worked. What he did was he found all of these Indian kids that were like in his town. And when you rode Uber for the very first time and you referred people, you got $25 in free credit. And somehow he made it so he could convince all these kids to take a free Uber to get $25 in credit and to continually refer themselves. I also think he ranked really high on Google for Uber discount code or Uber promo code. And so he accumulated millions of dollars of Uber credit and you could buy the Uber credit from him for $0.10 or $0.20 on the dollar. And I found this website and I was like, I'm doing this. And I bought, I think, $1,000 worth of Uber credit. And I— and then you have to change your iPhone from America to Moldova. Your Uber account has to be in Moldova. And that was this loophole. And he was making a lot of money doing it for an Indian, a guy in India. He was making thousands of dollars a month, which I think in the pod he is like, yeah, this is so much money. I think he was making 30 grand a month. And I always, I've always wondered what is that kid up to? I wanted to know where—

I remember having him on. He was fascinating. He was, he was fascinating. That was a great arbitrage that the guy, uh, you know, had architected for himself.

Very, I don't know if it's illegal, but definitely against the rules, questionably unethical. But when you see things like that, They're going somewhere. And I've always wanted to know what happened to that guy.

I want to leave you with two of the kind of, you know, I talked about like, why am I hearing about this three times? Don't just ignore this. Like I'm training my brain to not ignore these signals. Now I'll give you two of them for people who made it this far in the episode. These are the gems. This is the gem. Now, uh, this is the part where you're like, holy shit, I can't believe they saved this for the end, which is basically the two trends that I see right now that are strangely big. Go to, go to character.ai and pull up how much traffic you see that that website has.

Oh my God. I would've thought like 10,000 a month.

And what's the real number?

Oh my God. So 200 million. Exactly. 200 million.

What? This, You could go to the Wall Street Journal, it won't have 200 million. You could go to New York Times, it's not going to have 200 million. This is—

No media site has that. And it has an average visit duration of 33 minutes. It's beta.character.ai.

Okay, so I've been on this podcast talking about— It's all direct traffic. I've been talking about AI and I've been talking about OnlyFans and this kind of sometimes the crossover between AI and this AI OnlyFans thing. And I'm looking at investment opportunities in the space. There are so many companies that are doing this chat with an AI type of thing, Replika, Character AI, whatever. I never thought that would be a thing. They all have ludicrous traffic. We called it, by the way, we talked about Replika a year ago.

Girlfriends.

AI virtual girlfriends, exactly. And that's a lot of how people use this character AI thing. They kind of chat with— The chat, I think, goes into the gray area a little bit.

I mean, it's a lot of like smart people like Einstein, but the top person is Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish. And then like some K-pop lady, like there's probably a weird thing going on.

So people being willing to chat with AI for a really long time, so easy to write off as weird loser. It's my friend watching StarCraft tournaments in the room next door, right? Dork, king dork behavior. I will not make that mistake again. This is definitely something. I don't think that these companies necessarily are the winners. But like, you know, every, every product, there's a kind of like the wave 1 of attempts, wave 2 of attempts, wave 3. And then finally there's like the last mover, right? The last mover who actually nails it and builds a full-on product around this. And so there's something in this space that's like ranges from companionship to naughty chat that like with AI that's going to be massive because the numbers are off the charts. The behavior of this strange thing is off the charts. Okay, that's one. Second one, which is less crazy, is, um, there's a bunch of really smart people that are now have a new business strategy and their business strategy is to buy wounded unicorns. And so heard it once, heard it twice, heard it 3 times. First heard this from Andrew Wilkinson. Andrew Wilkinson, he, he called me back a couple years ago. I was living in my old house in San Francisco and he, I remember him telling me, you know what I would do if I was you is I would find one of these, uh, startups that's raised venture capital. but is not gonna become a billion-dollar company, but they got to $5 million in revenue, $10 million in revenue, and you could buy these for cheap because they don't have a, they can't raise their next round and there's no way out. And so there's not really like a, a good exit market for that group. And those people don't want to like fire a bunch of the engineers, stop paying high prices for their San Francisco office space and like become profitable. They could in theory, but they're just not gonna eat shit. In order to do that, they're just going to shut it down, return investor money, sell the assets to whoever, and they're going to go start their next company or go get a job. He told me that first. He had then done that with a company called Meteor. So Meteor was this developer framework, and I think he bought a company that was doing like $5 to $7 million. It was doing like $5 million plus in revenue for like 1x revenue or less. I don't know. It was like some like— ignore the multiple, the exact multiple.

I think they raised $30 million. Or something like that.

They had raised a bunch of money. It had customers, it had revenue, but it just wasn't going to be the next big thing, which is venture capital is called become the next big thing or bust. And what he realized was if they bust, we could pick some of these assets up. So Andrew had said it. Then, um, you hear other people that are talking about this, that are doing this. Our friends Xavier and SIEVA, they're doing this right now. If you're driving to San Francisco, there is a billboard with, with their company that says like Whatever, like, there's never too late for a second chance. It looks like, honestly, it looks like a divorce lawyer because it's KJ with her arms crossed and it says like, um, you know, there's always, uh, you know, there's always a second chance or something like that. And I don't know, they have a billboard, they literally have a billboard entering San Francisco. Like when you come in on whatever, the 101, it's like, um, uh, it's right there and it's basically saying, you know, like don't just shut down your company, sell it to us. So they're doing this. Jeremy Giffen is like, he came on Invest Like the Best and he was like, yeah, I think one of the big opportunities right now is to do this. You hear this 4 or 5 times from smart people. Like, you got to be an idiot to not realize that there's probably something there. And it's like, it's not— you're hearing it from the news. Like, you got to know where you're hearing it from. You're not hearing it from the news or like the hype cycle type of things. It's like You hear smart people mention these things in kind of passing or these opportunities, but it's not consensus yet. And you realize like, oh, that's probably one of these, like what I call like, you know, value spots or fat pitches. So like, what are the big fat pitches that you could go swing at? You don't have to go swing at it, but like you should identify that at any given time, there's like a couple of fat pitch opportunities that you could be going for. That's one of them.

I want to learn more about it. I want to, how do you find, I mean, I want to know, I've got questions like, how do you find them? Just run Hampton, bro.

Don't, don't even, don't even think about it. Just keep running Hampton. You already got your fat pitch. Well, um, by the way, love saying fat pitch, by the way. Just a fun, fun phrase to say.

Yeah, I agree. Uh, it's a good one. It's a good one. Where'd you steal that from? Ted Williams? Warren Buffett, who stole it from Ted Williams.

Who knows?

I know he said it in his biography. I know, hard to say. No, I said it very easily. Um, all right, that's the pod.